BLUE RIDGE PARKWAY _ Here's how not to start a road trip.
First, at the Alamo rental car counter at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport just over the line from Washington, D.C., discover that your driver's license is missing. Search and swear for two hours. Then find it in your left shoe.
Second, when the Holiday Inn clerk asks what brings you to town, tell him you're kicking off a big fall foliage road trip: all 105 miles of Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, then all 469 miles of the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina.
"You and 70,000 other cars," the clerk will say. "It's bad."
Third, get lost in Dismal Hollow.
That's how my Blue Ridge adventure began last October. Without giving away too much, I can tell you I did escape Dismal Hollow (outside Front Royal, Va.), and I didn't have traffic troubles.
Also, as a Californian, I must admit that Appalachian fall foliage is to California fall foliage as a full orchestra is to two oboes, a bassoon and some guy banging on a rusty triangle.
For five days I could almost hear the swelling violins as I zoomed under leafy canopies of red, orange and gold; hiked along creeks, lakes and ridge lines; listened to plenty of bluegrass and blues; and gave thanks to the National Park Service for bringing together so much beauty and so much blacktop.
We don't consider road-building a prime task of the park service these days. But the NPS, born just eight years after the Model T, spent its first decades building some of the most gorgeous drives in North America.
Other NPS parkways that carry the "national" designation: George Washington Memorial Parkway (District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia); Natchez Trace (Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee); and John D. Rockefeller Jr. Memorial Parkway (Wyoming).
The Blue Ridge Parkway, authorized in 1936, has been all about the automobile from Day One.
The parkway and Shenandoah National Park were Depression projects intended to create jobs in a desperately poor region. For the parkway, the idea was to sculpt an epic country road, a black ribbon that would unfurl seamlessly amid the knobs, hollows, notches and gaps of Virginia and North Carolina.
The work took decades, but now the road's shoulders are graced with overlooks, its straightaways unsullied by billboards, commercial trucks or service stations. (There are also plenty of hiking trails along the route, including the 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail.)
To get gas or find most hotels, you exit the parkway and re-enter the real world. The parkway speed limit is 45 mph, which means that when red leaves drift in the breeze or a deer pauses in a meadow, you're moving slowly enough to notice.
For most of the last 50 years, including 2015, the parkway has been the most-visited unit in the park system. Last year its rangers counted 15 million visitors, who spent an estimated $950 million.
The tourist tides seem to include more bicyclists every year, which is tricky on its narrow roads. October is as busy as the summer months, in some places busier.
Still, if you visit from California and you're lucky enough to be driving on weekdays, not weekends, the parkway is nice work.
Skyline Drive was my prelude. Light traffic. A bounding stag at Hog Wallow Flats. A treed bear at Bootens Gap. At Lewis Mountain, I checked out cabins that until about 1950 were set aside for "colored" visitors.
By 5 p.m., I reached Rockfish Gap, Va., where Skyline Drive ends and the Blue Ridge Parkway begins.
